Text complexity can be reduced by making different choices at the lexical and grammatical levels. However, discourse-level choices may also affect a text’s complexity. In a coherent text, explicit discourse relations (e.g. CAUSE, CONDITION) are expressed using discourse markers (e.g. since, because, etc.) that may be preferred for texts at different readability levels. In this paper, we investi...

Discourse markers, also known as clue words, are used extensively in human-human task-oriented dialogs to signal the structure of the discourse. Previous work showed their importance in monologs and social conversations for marking discourse structure , but little attention has been paid to their importance in spoken dialog systems. This paper investigates what discourse markers signal about th...

A spontaneously spoken, natural Japanese discourse contains many instances of the so-called redundant interjections and of back-channel utterances. These expressions have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made, since they were regarded as useless, spurious expressions. On the basis of the analysis of spoken dialogue corpus, we claim that these utterances...

Discourse markers are complex discontinuous linguistic expressions which are used to explicitly signal the discourse structure of a text. This paper describes efforts to improve an automatic tagging system which identifies and classifies discourse markers in Chinese texts by applying machine learning (ML) to the disambiguation of discourse markers, as an integral part of automatic text summariz...

This study examined what discourse markers (DM) and their characteristics are in English. It described the range of uses of English discourse markers in conversations included in Interchange books. It also determined the most frequently used discourse markers. It was found that "oh" and "well" were the most frequently used discourse markers in the conversations, and then the functions of them w...

This paper explores several aspects together for a fine-grained Chinese discourse analysis. We deal with the issues of ambiguous discourse markers, ambiguous marker linkings, and more than one discourse marker. A universal feature representation is proposed. The pair-once postulation, cross-discourse-unit-first rule and word-pair-marker-first rule select a set of discourse markers from ambiguou...

Discourse markers are words or phrases that function as indicators of the structure of discourse by e.g. signalling the beginning of a new topic. This study reports on the Swedish discourse markers men ‘but’/‘and’ and så ‘so’, their functions and prosodic correlates in dialogue.

this study investigated two major types of metadiscourse markers as used in typical sales contracts, written by english natives and iranian non-natives. in so doing, 60 sales contracts were selected, 30 written by native english and 30 by iranian non-natives. based on hyland and tse’s taxonomy, the contracts were codified and classified in terms of the frequency and percentage of the interactiv...

Different issues have been probed in learner corpus research since the late 1980s.However, taking the im- portance of meta discourse markers (MDMs) in signposting academic discourse, their use in Iranian EFL learners‟ academic essays is an area of research in need of a more serious analysis. Contributing to this line of investigation, this paper reports a corpus-based study of the use of MDMs i...